


Cheedo and the Wives

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [13]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Child Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 02:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6101656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cheedo is a peculiar brand of innocent, the kind that comes from ignorance and perhaps the only kind of innocent left in the Wasteland. Even with the alethiometer, she knows less truth than any of the Wives. But that's alright. She's young, yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. and the Splendid Angharad

She had been in the Vault the longest. Longer than Angharad, even, who was much older and wiser than Cheedo but who loved her anyway. Angharad was alone the first time Cheedo met her. The last time she’d been outside, there had been two Wives, Restful and Lotti the Wary. Lotti had always started to cry when she saw Cheedo, and Restful had only tolerated the girl, ignoring her attempts and conversation and her yellow hound daemon turning up his nose at Jiemba’s friendly overtures.

Today, after she’d answered Joe’s questions (Where are the buzzards hiding? What does the salt road lead to? Where is the clearest water in a thousand miles? That last one was the way he always ended their ‘conversation.’ Cheedo always looked and saw the same thing. Citadel, Citadel, Citadel.) Cheedo was let out into the Vault, and she thought it was empty. The Wives were gone, and the room was somehow bigger without them.

Cheedo wandered over to the windows, Jiemba a black cat at her heels. Laying out under the filtered sun was one of their favorite things, no matter how dark and burned she got. She loved watching the cars and the people go by like ants, and she’d make up stories to tell herself when she was locked away again.

“How did you get in here?”

The new Wife’s voice was angry, but she sounded afraid, too. Cheedo spun around, startled but not worried. None of the Wives had ever been allowed to touch her.

“I live here. Who are you?”

Whatever this new Wife was, she looked fearsome, with her tawny hair and the huge lioness by her side. It was the largest daemon Cheedo had ever seen; Jiemba at once changed into an oversized pangolin to defend her.

“You’re a _child_ ,” the Wife said, and the horror in her voice was not directed at Cheedo. “You can’t possibly be a Wife.”

“Of course I’m not,” Cheedo scoffed. “I read the Immortan’s truth compass.” She was proud of the way she didn’t stumble over the last word even once.

The Wife didn’t have a response to that. Cheedo watched her for another minute or so, wary of that lioness’s intent stare. She was not used to being looked at; Jiemba shuffled on his armored feet, echoing her discomfort.

“What’s your name?” Cheedo asked at last, curiosity overcoming her fear. She had never really had to be afraid before. Except when Joe came. Then she told herself that she wasn’t afraid, but she knew the difference between truths and lies. For some things, she didn’t need the alethiometer.

“Angharad,” the Wife said, slowly, like it was precious. Like she still had to sound out each letter, to make sure it was real. Cheedo felt no such attachment to her own name, but she nodded thoughtfully and sat cross-legged in the shadow of her favorite plant (the one with long, fuzzy leaves that draped over her like fingers, that tickled her shoulders when she moved).

“I’m Cheedo,” the girl said, patting Jiemba’s side to reassure him. Her daemon crept over to press against her, but he didn’t shift into a smaller size, just kept staring at the lioness and quivering under her hand.

“How long have you lived here, Cheedo?” the new Wife asked, and took a seat by the pool. Her daemon pretended to ignore them; padded away up the stairs to the little loft where there were blankets and pillows and those wordburgers Joe didn’t like her to look at too long. She’d seen a Wife reading one, once, and had asked if the symbols were the same as the alethiometer’s or more complicated.

Cheedo didn’t know how to answer the Wife’s question, so she shrugged. She glanced out the window, but she was too far away to see any of the proper action — the little people, the cars, the big gears shifting in the Tower opposite them. The desert view that took up most of their window was pretty, but boring. Cheedo wanted to _see_.

“Does he,” Angharad sounded different now, harder, like each word was so sharp it hurt. Cheedo looked at her, something nervous uncurling in her belly, and Jiemba growled. “Does he hurt you?”

Cheedo didn’t really know how to answer this question either. _Yes_ , she almost said, with child-like grace. _Yes I am hurt and don’t know why._

She did not say it. Instead, she plucked at the fine, clean cloth of her draped dress and she said, “I’m almost as valu-able as the truth compass.” (She has to sound one word out. It’s his word, repeated with a pat to the head when she’s done well for the day.) “He wouldn’t ever hurt his treasures.”

_Unless you did something wrong. You get it wrong sometimes, even when you know you’ve answered right. That’s why he has to lock us up._

Jiemba turned into an armadillo and climbed into her lap, long nose sticking up into the air in Angharad’s direction. Cheedo cuddled him closer, folded herself up around him to forget about the cloying darkness, the hungry wooden door. Angharad was sitting with her back to it, and almost Cheedo told her to look out, to turn around, keep an eye on it. Her lioness wasn’t there to watch it for her.

Again, she stayed quiet, and shewasn’t sure if it was pride or fear that had her stomach churning.

It was the new Wife’s turn not to know an answer, though Cheedo hadn’t really asked a question. Angharad looked away, out towards the Vault door, and for the first time Cheedo saw that her hands, so lovely and long, were swollen with bruises.

“Are you okay?” she blurted out, not meaning to. Angharad looked sharply back at her, and Cheedo could only hold up her own hands, wiggle her fingers in example. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

For a moment Angharad looked startled. Her eyebrows went halfway up her forehead (smooth, unscarred. whole skin like all the Wives had) and the look was funny on her. Cheedo smiled, though she didn’t quite laugh (Jiemba did. A tiny armadillo laugh, so maybe Angharad didn’t hear it).

“It doesn’t hurt so much right now,” the Wife said, which wasn’t an answer really. Cheedo frowned, trying to think of a better way of asking the question (better questions got better answers, and she always needed better answers) but Angharad stood to walk over and sit beside her under the fuzzy leaves and she took one in her hand, petted it like she would her daemon. “There’s so much green here,” she murmured, and it was like she wasn’t talking to Cheedo at all. “It’s like a nightmare.”

Cheedo looked at her for a while, trying to peel back the ubiquitous beauty of a Wife and see what was underneath. It was important to know the truth about people. If she had been sitting next to any other Wife in her experience, she would have been uncomfortable; the Wives tended to either shun her or smother her, and Cheedo wanted neither.

Sitting next to Angharad felt like sitting next to a very bright lamp. There was something searing about her, in her swollen knuckles and the necklace of handprints she wore around her neck. But something comforting too. Something like light in the dark, and Cheedo wanted to be close to it.

She found she didn’t mind sitting next to Angharad, at the edge of the Vault garden, as long as Angharad was willing to listen to her stories. Some of them were drawn piecemeal from her readings of the alethiometer, distanced by isolation and Cheedo’s lack of context for the questions she answered. Turned to fairy tales, bloodless, mirages along the black scar of Fury Road that could be seen from the Vault. Cheedo had never had someone listen to her before, and the delight was so heady that she could almost ignore the way Angharad’s face would sometimes go dead, or angry, or sad. Angharad never stopped her, never said she was bored, and Cheedo spun tales for hours and hours, until the sun went away and an Imperator came with her food. And she slunk back to her room, Jiemba a black snake at her feet, to be locked in until Joe came to visit her again.

The food came with a jar of lamp oil, pungent and icky, and Cheedo poured it oh-so-carefully into her lamp. She pretended that the flame was Angharad, so she could go on telling stories to it.


	2. and the Dag

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone was wondering why the Immortan Joe himself was at the head of a War Party for an Oasis that had only been settled for a hundred days, well. This is the answer. (refer to chapter 5 of [Exiled from Eden](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5808775/chapters/13411285) for reference)

Cheedo was called Fragile after Joe’s temper finally outmatched his care for the alethiometer. It was the last question of the day, and his reactions had been good so far, and Cheedo really wanted to go out and stick her feet in the pool and have Capable braid her hair. Capable was by far the kindest Wife she’d ever met.

She was distracted, so it took her a moment to realize that the compass wasn’t landing on the same symbols it usually did when Joe asked about clear water. Usually it went garden, horse, globe, hourglass. Garden for the Citadel, horse for travel, globe for great distance, and the hourglass to mean that death would reach any traveler before water did.

Today the needle flicked past the garden and instead settled briefly on the cornucopia. It moved to the moon, and the loaf of bread, and the griffin, and Cheedo almost fell out of the reading trance. Dread built up in her stomach and Jiemba became a bat, tangling his feet in her hair and watching Joe’s hyena daemon with little squeaks of distress that Cheedo felt but couldn’t hear.

“Well? What’s the answer?” Joe snarled. He knew something was wrong. Cheedo swallowed.

“There’s water. Only a day to the West. An oasis. Clear water. Green.”

For a moment she wondered if he had understood her at all. Then, with a terrible howl, the hyena lunged at her. Cheedo scrambled back, the alethiometer clutched to her chest, and barely avoided the daemon’s snapping teeth. She did not avoid Joe’s open-handed slap that threw her across the room. Instincts deeper than self-preservation made Cheedo turn, take the wall’s hurt along her arm and side rather than risk the alethiometer. Only she hit the wall wrong, felt the bone in her arm snap as easy as brittle shale. Cheedo cried, and then she screamed when his hyena’s jaws closed around Jiemba’s frantic bat-wings. She could crush him with a single bite, and Cheedo was abruptly certain that she _would_ , that Joe would kill Cheedo’s daemon and leave her in this room until she starved to death.

“They’re taking water from _my_ aquifer!” he screamed, and Cheedo curled herself around the alethiometer and didn’t move.

But he didn’t seem interested in crossing the room to take his anger out on her. Instead, he and his daemon marched out into the Vault, shouting for Primus, stationed outside the door. Ilaria took Jiemba with her, and after a moment the first tugs of that terrible loneliness-pain pulled Cheedo to her feet.

Joe was already gone – his furious roar echoed down the Vault tunnel, accompanied by shrieks from Primus’ vulture daemon. At the Vault’s entrance, Ilaria spit out Jiemba, who immediately changed into a canary and flew to Cheedo’s anxious grasp. The hyena bared her teeth in a terrifying grin, and then the door was swinging shut, sealing them in. To Cheedo, who could barely remember living anywhere else, the shut door was almost comforting. It blocked off Joe’s shouts as easily as if there was a whole mountain between her and him.

She sank to the floor, clutching Jiemba to her and sobbing. Her face was swelling, and blood was pooling in her mouth, but by far the worst was the terrible pain in her arm, bent at an unnatural angle and skin distended by bone.

***

The Dag was made of bones and silver, a fierce skeleton wrapped in a white shroud and delivered to the Vault. She was thinner than the Wretched, even, and her daemon had not been cleaned of mud and blood and dust, held close now that Joe was gone, staining the white of her bridal dress. Cheedo had been let out for almost two whole days in a row, and she was giddy with the smell of the chilled Vault air and Jiemba was a clever-footed ocelot at her heels.

Sure, her arm was bound tight to her chest so that the bone would set, and it ached with the fierce reminder of Joe’s anger, but Cheedo could pretend to ignore that. She was becoming very good at such things. She had danced up to the loft where Capable was curled up on her cushions, trying to win a smile out of the red haired Wife. It was harder to make Angharad smile, but Capable could almost always be pleaded into a clapping game or a dance, despite the tear-brightness her eyes got sometimes.

And then the Vault door swung open. It was a singular sound, an echo of gears and an ominous, never-ending series of clicks, and everyone inside knew it intimately. Even Cheedo, who was usually locked in her room when Joe came. But it was the middle of the day, and he had not asked for the alethiometer since Cheedo’s terribly true reading.

Capable rushed to the edge of the loft, put her hands on sculpted stone and stared down, trembling. She had not been a Wife for long. But Cheedo did not know how to comfort her. The little girl only came and stood next to her, barely able to see over the ledge, Jiemba launching himself effortlessly onto the low wall next to her ear.

It was not the Immortan come to fetch his treasures. It was an Imperator, one with a great griffon vulture on one shoulder, and on his other arm was a Wife wrapped in white like a shroud, her daemon a mud-spiked rag in her arms.

The Imperator left them there, and that was good. Imperators had no place in the matters of the Vault. Cheedo stared down at the new Wife, thinking that she looked very small from up here, and didn’t follow Capable when the red-head rushed down the stairs.

“I think she came from out beyond the sunset,” Jiemba said, shifting to a ferret to press the whole length of him along her bandaged arm and whisper in her ear. Cheedo only stared, watching the new Wife’s hair shimmering like light on water. “Cheedo. Cheedo, I think she came from a place a day's ride to the west.”

“Clear water,” Cheedo whispered, thinking of the dancing needles hidden in her room, but she couldn’t manage any other words through the unbearable pressure in her chest and throat. “Jiemba, you don’t know that. She could have come from anywhere.” She meant to be scolding him, but instead she only sounded afraid.

“Would you ask her?” her daemon pressed, already knowing the answer. Cheedo shivered, and went to wrap herself up in Capable’s forgotten wrap, climbing down the stairs like it was the last thing she could do.


	3. and Capable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just saying people, seriously this is not a happy fic. Heed the tags.

Cheedo knew things without asking them. Or if she asked, it was not the Wives she consulted. Capable wasn’t sure if the girl had ever asked the alethiometer anything Joe hadn’t told her to. (Toast insisted it was impossible to resist such temptation, once the alethiometer had been explained to her. Capable, who knew more than any of them what a Warlord looked like when you were small and your daemon unsettled, shook her head at that.)

Cheedo knew things, but she didn’t understand them. She knew that Angharad cut her face, but not why. She knew that Toast hated the view from the Vault windows and the softness of the potted plants, but not why. And neither Wife was the kind to answer such dangerous questions. She knew that too, and never asked.

It was so clear that no one had ever really cared about her, except as a thing that spouted answers from the alethiometer like a gusher from Gastown, and Capable burned with the need to make things right. She always had, but here there was something she could _do_ , so she did it. She brushed Cheedo’s hair, and did her best to listen to the wild stories, mixed up out of a thousand truths told from the alethiometer into a fairy tale lie.

Angharad cared for Cheedo, but not in the way that Capable did. Capable wanted to be cool and soothing as water, wanted to wrap herself around Cheedo and never let Joe touch her again. Angharad was fire, bright and unyielding, and Cheedo was drawn to her like a moth drawn to a lamp, not caring if she was burned up as she went. Angharad taught Cheedo how to be more than a thing, sometimes on purpose (telling her the alethiometer didn’t matter without Cheedo to read it), sometimes just by being ( _believing_ that alethiometer didn’t matter,it was only Cheedo who did).

As she grew older, she was more often than not in their company, and part of them in a way that Capable both treasured and dreaded. Because what was left, when Cheedo was grown after a lifetime sheltered in the Vault? Tall and soft and beautiful, as happy to decorate herself with cosmetics as she was to bounce after the Dag asking for stories. Even for Capable it was sometimes hard to deal with Cheedo, with the girl’s inquisitiveness and ignorance.

For Angharad, it was literally painful, as the Wife would never show her rage around Cheedo, but would wrap her fists in cloth and slam them against the walls once the girl had gone. “I _hate_ him,” she would say, when Capable reached out to cover bloody knuckles with her palms. “For that. For everything. But every time I see her, I hate him most for _grooming_ her.”

That was before any of them had endured a pregnancy. And then they had far more to hate.

There was never a shortage of time in the Vault. And they had nothing to do but talk. As often as their talk turned ugly, when Cheedo was with them they all took part. Capable insisted that they were only sheltering her, that Cheedo didn’t need to know their bitterness. Toast would glower, and mutter that sooner or later she _would_ know, and Angharad would look away, her lips twisted and her mouth sour with Joe’s lies. So he made them all complicit, and when he came to the Vault and demanded that they preform like trained dogs, Capable only pasted a smile to her face and pretended that Cheedo’s delight with the suddenly sweet Wives did not feel like the pounding of hammers against her heart.


	4. and Toast the Knowing

Toast was the one Cheedo liked least. It was not like Capable, who always listened to her complaints but seldom had time for stories, or Angharad, who wanted to show her how to make a fist and told her that the heroes in her stories should be girls sometimes. And Toast wasn’t _anything_ like the Dag, who was quiet and knew all the best stories and had hair softer than Jiemba’s Maine Coon fur.

Toast was a thorny, prickling person who believed she knew better than anyone else in the Vault because she’d had a bike of her own, once upon a time. Her daemon wasn’t any nicer — Tarl had snarled at Jiemba when the latter had tried to get him to play tag. Jiemba had even changed into a badger too, so it would have been quite fair.

“Why don’t you grow up?” The settled daemon had asked.

“Why should I want to do that?”

“Because everyone has to,” Toast had said, furious, scooping her daemon up into her arms. “Some of us sooner than others.”

It got better the longer she was in the Vault. Miss Giddy came, and Toast reluctantly attended her lessons, and taught the other Wives how to braid her hair, which was by now a puffy mess that hung past her shoulder blades and was impossible to brush. Even worse than the Dag’s starshine-fine strands. Cheedo got a turn braiding too, and Tarl said her smaller fingers were good at it, though he still shifted away when Jiemba tried to sit next to him.

And then.

And then.

If there was one thing Cheedo would never admit she was afraid of, it was her room. She still went in there every night. Because it was a test, and if she didn’t she would be locked up and not let out ever again. And it had been so long since Joe had had to lock her away. She loved the Vault, and the Wives, and she would never wish anything bad on them ever, even Toast.

She would never wish for Toast to take one of the razors the Wives used to keep their skin smooth, hairless, and run it through her lovely braids until there were none left. Until her head was rough and stubbled and _ugly_.

Cheedo had come out one morning, and it was done. Toast was bald and smiling, tangling her braids into something like a rope. Into something like a noose, though Cheedo couldn’t recognize it. The others hadn’t known she was going to do it either — Capable gasped and scolded and worried. The Dag bit her lips until they bled, Pheona making anxious little chuffing noises. Angharad only gathered up the cut hair from Toast’s strong fingers and pushed them into the potted dirt of the plants under the window, turning away from them to hide her smile. Her daemon hummed and smoothed Tarl’s fur down with her tongue, a gentle grooming like thanks. Like pride.

And they had all day to sit and wait. All day to wonder what He would do, when He came back that night and saw what had happened. Cheedo hadn’t been let out as often when Joe first caught Angharad cutting herself, and she didn’t know what had happened, but it she knew it hadn’t stopped the Wife. Cheedo couldn’t imagine when something would matter so much that you’d be punished for it not once, but many times. She avoided Joe’s punishments as much as she could, touched her arm to remind her what happened to bad girls, and smelled Ilaria’s breath in her nose when she wondered if disobeying him was worth it.

So she didn’t know what Joe would do to Toast for cutting her hair like that, but she knew it would be terrible and she wished with all her heart that the Wife had not done it. It was not so bad, here. Why did they have to make him hurt them?

When Jiemba dared to whisper the question to Pheona, the fox had snapped at him, dark eyes glittering with fear, but with jealousy too. She wished they had been strong enough to do what Toast did. “Your person’s not a Wife,” Pheona hissed, angrier than Jiemba had ever heard her. “You live here but you’re not a Wife. It’s different. Thank your stars that it’s different for you, but don’t try to blame _her_ for this.”

In the end, he stormed and raged and Cheedo hid up in the loft and he put fists to Toast’s face and her chest and her back. And then, reduced to incoherent roaring, Joe dragged her to _Cheedo’s_ room and threw her in. “You’ll grow hair back before I have to look at you again,” he told her, implacable. Immortan. “You’ll learn not to defy me.”

Tarl made it inside before he shut the door. But that was not the purpose of the punishment, and Joe allowed it. He locked the door (the key was always in the lock outside) and pulled Angharad out of the Vault with him, still angry. Angharad went, like all of them did, small hands wrapped around his arm and there would be bruises on her arms. Angharad was always bruised.

Cheedo did not come down until much, much later. Capable and the Dag were sitting together on the chairs outside their bedroom, heads tilted together, not really talking. Just being close. Caelai was on Capable’s lap, Pheona on the Dag’s. The daemons were laying nose to nose, eyes half closed with the exhaustion that came after fear. And if, where Capable and the Dag’s legs were pressed together hip to knee, their daemons touched skin that was not theirs to touch, well. None of the four of them said anything about it.

Cheedo reached up to touch Jiemba, a mouse on her shoulder, and he let out a tiny squeak that was made up of sadness and longing and leftover fear. She wanted to sit with them, but she was not a Wife. And her room was gone, and Joe had closed the door on someone else. Cheedo’s world had been turned upside down, and she didn’t know where was safe anymore.

Pheona opened one eye, and lifted her head to look at them. After a moment the Dag followed suit, shaking silver hair out of her eyes and smiling a little when she saw Cheedo. She held out one hand, wrapped in white cloth spotted with red (another letter for her fingers, pressed out of dark leaves from the plants in the window and the fire of a gas lamp and into her skin with needles) and beckoned Cheedo closer. “Come on then,” she said, making room on the third chair. Capable looked up for a moment, and she smiled too, and only then did Cheedo let herself step closer, lay her head on the Dag’s shoulder and curl her knees up to her chest.

Heart beating too fast, Jiemba curled in the hollow of her throat, she reached out to press her fingers against the back of the Dag’s wrapped hand, curl around to grasp the uncovered palm with one of hers. And the Dag did not pull away, laced her fingers close with Cheedo’s, leaned back into Capable and let herself be used as a pillow. Her heart was so close that Cheedo could hear it beating, could hear the low rush of air into her lungs.

Like that, the three of them, they waited for Angharad’s return.


End file.
